In-line finishing devices for sheet fed printers may sometimes require re-orienting printed sheets for finishing or stacking. For example, sheets printed in a portrait orientation must be reoriented before presenting the sheets to a finishing device or stacker that requires a landscape orientation. In one conventional technique for reorienting print media sheets, a finger protruding into the media path blocks one corner of the moving sheet, causing the sheet to rotate about that corner as it moves past the protruding finger. While this technique may be satisfactory for smaller sheets, up to A4 size sheets for example, it does not work well for larger sheets. Larger sheets of flexible print media tend to collapse or buckle at the point of impact with the finger. In one conventional technique for reorienting larger sheets of print media, the sheet moves on to a table that is rotated to the desired orientation. Such rotating tables project a large horizontal “footprint” and thus occupy a comparatively large amount of floor space. Conventional rotating tables may also be disadvantageous due to the need to vary the speed of the sheets as they move from the printer on to the table, where each sheet stops as the table is rotated, and then accelerated as the sheets are moved off the table to the finisher.
The same part numbers are used to designate the same or similar parts throughout the figures.